Appeals Court Overturns Terrorism Conviction of Bin Laden’s Driver

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the terrorism conviction of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden whose case has been one of the most tangled to emerge from the war crimes trials of detainees held by the military at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The court found that Mr. Hamdan’s conviction by a military commission for providing material support for terrorism could not stand because, under the international law of war in effect at the time of his actions, there was no such defined war crime.

The Military Commission Act, a law passed in 2006, does not authorize such retroactive prosecutions, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled.

The case of Mr. Hamdan, once considered a dangerous terrorist by the Bush administration, forced Congress to pass that 2006 statute in the first place.

Lawyers for Mr. Hamdan, a Yemeni who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, had challenged his detention and won a landmark Supreme Court case in 2006 that found the military commission system for prosecuting war crimes unconstitutional and in violation of American military law and the Geneva Conventions. That forced Congress to rewrite the rules, leading to Mr. Hamdan’s trial and conviction in 2008. Because he had already served so long in prison, he was released later that year to Yemen, his home country.

Mr. Hamdan traveled from Yemen to Pakistan and then Afghanistan in 1996, attended a Qaeda training camp, met Bin Laden, and became a driver carrying jihadis and their weapons. Eventually he began driving Bin Laden personally, and even was told by Bin Laden several days before Sept. 11, 2001, that they would have to evacuate their compound because of an impending operation that might provoke retaliation.

His legal journey began in 2001, after his capture in Afghanistan. He was sent to Guantánamo Bay soon after it opened in early 2002, but his case proceeded slowly, in part because of legal challenges to the Bush administration’s new system of military commissions for terrorism suspects. He was granted few rights, and has claimed he was beaten and kept in isolation for months.

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In 2008, charged with conspiracy as well as eight counts of material support, he was acquitted of the conspiracy charge, which might have produced a longer sentence. He was sentenced to 66 months of confinement and credited for having already served most of that time since being charged. The verdict was a setback for the military prosecutors, who had contended that they could detain him indefinitely.

Even after his release, he continued to challenge his conviction. It was upheld in 2011 by the Court of Military Commission Review, which the Appeals Court has now reversed.

The ruling called into question whether other Guantanamo detainees accused of being part of Al Qaeda but not of plotting any specific terrorist attack can receive military trials.

The opinion was written by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who worked as a lawyer in the White House for President George W. Bush before he was appointed to the bench. His opinion was largely joined by Chief Judge David Sentelle and Judge Douglas Ginsburg, appointees of Ronald Reagan.

Zachary Katznelson, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the decision “strikes the biggest blow yet against the legitimacy of the Guantánamo military commissions, which have for years now been trying people for a supposed war crime that in fact is not a war crime at all.” He said the government should prosecute in civilian courts any Guantánamo prisoners against whom it has enough admissible evidence.

Correction: October 16, 2012

An earlier version misstated the president who nominated Chief Judge David Sentelle; it was Ronald Reagan, not Bill Clinton.